The Why and How of Removing nofollow From Wordpress 1.5
I have effective spam filters on my email, but it doesn’t discourage spammers in any way. Just the same, the nofollow attribute will do nothing to stop comment spammers from wasting your time. Using nofollow is destructive to the legitimate value of those people who leave links in their comments and I won’t aid Google or Yahoo or anyone else in throwing that value away. Of all the smart choices included in Wordpress 1.5, including nofollow with no easy way to turn it off is a disappointment.
How to Remove nofollow From Wordpress 1.5
Any good idea that’s worth doing is worth doing as a Wordpress plugin and fortunately Simple Thoughts has put together a Wordpress plugin to strip comments of this nofollow goofiness. Simply install it, activate it and you’re good to go.
Permanent Link
There is a specific advantage to adding it:
helping to prevent our search queries for sucking. Certain queries on Google are for all intents worthless thanks to the “Google Bombing” done by spammers.
If everyone at least helps sift through this. Spammers now have to spend more to get high google ranking.
This makes it easier for us to keep using a search engine. IMHO important in an internet where information grows in exponential amounts.
Robert,
Your comment itself is a great example of why nofollow is a misguided response to a serious problem. You left your website location as a part of your comment and as far as I’m concerned, that’s something of value. The fact that you had something to add here shows that our sites may be related in nature or interest, but if I used nofollow Google would be blind to that value. Throwing away an entire category of data because some of it may be tainted is an primitive reaction at best.